“Now?” Betty calls but Carly has to stop watching for a minute. It’s hard to see. Instead she looks out through the dark robe of Jesus and watches the driveway for the car lights that will bring Whitey back. The church across the street has a sign lit up that says ESCAPE THE HEAT, NOW AND ETERNALLY. Lord yes. She is picturing herself in a cool cool place like the creek where she used to swim, like the cool leather luxury of Thomas’s Cadillac when they parked at the far edge of the parking lot and he explained how much he loved her even though his position in town didn’t allow him to leave his marriage, how he would love to help her with her boy’s expenses but his wife would be suspicious, even more than she already was; he was kissing her neck, slowly unbuttoning her blouse, his fine motor skills perfectly tuned when all of a sudden she hears Betty screeching and crying out. She is so mad, cussing and carrying on. The nurse comes in and sees Betty sitting there with the heavy lamp raised, and if the cord hadn’t looped and twisted around the back of the wheelchair, she would have done some real damage. As it was, the lamp slipped from her hands and crashed down beside her chair, the body of it shattering into hundreds of pieces. He/she snatches the 3 Musketeers bar that Carly had just bought and slipped in Betty’s pocket as a surprise. The nurse says, “That’s it, the last straw, you could have killed me.” He/she says Betty is going straight to the west hall, which, when all is said and done, probably means that they think Betty is failing fast.
“You let me down,” Betty screams at Carly. “I hate you. I hate you. I wish you were dead.”
Hours later and Carly can still hear her. Whore. Home wrecker. How could you do this to me? She still hears Betty even though she and Homer have been sitting here shaking and crying for nearly an hour while they wait for Wheel of Fortune and while Carly waits for Whitey to return.
Days pass it seems and when she asks where her boyfriend, the lawyer, has gone, she is told home. He has moved back home, back where he belongs. He is lucky, they say, he has a family. So now Carly is left with only one favorite thing in her life and right now he is struggling to get away from her because that old marine down the hall has taken to bribing him away from her with treats. A boy’s head can get turned quick by what he decides he wants in his life, and of course, what he doesn’t want. He whines and pulls but she will not let him go, not this time. This time she is staying there with him all the night through. She buries her face in his pretty brown hair and whispers what a good boy he is. “Please forgive me,” she cries. “I’d go back and do it all different if I could. You know I love you better than life itself, don’t you? Don’t you see that I always have?”
Starlings
AT TEN IN the morning the temperature has already hit a hundred degrees and the weather station says it will keep rising. Mary squints out at the thermometer. The glare from the tin roof of her porch is making everything in the yard wavy. The big oak tree that was already big when she was just a little girl trying to climb up its rough trunk quivers limply overhead. She remembers squashing her face into the bark as she grabbed the branches and pulled herself up. But that was back when the only thing beyond her yard was a couple of houses down the road and the flat tobacco fields, the strip of woods that kept that old snake-infested river shady and cool. That was back before the interstate plowed through town, taking away the fields and the woods and bringing with it all kinds of businesses and crime.
Now she is seventy-six and it is the hottest summer that she can recall, every summer of her life spent here in this very house, though now everything is overgrown and changed. Now the downtown area has spread in every direction and she lives on the corner of what is considered an old black neighborhood. Now her road is paved and the area is overrun with college students who want to live within walking distance of the campus, where Mary spent the last good years of her life working. She swept and mopped and cleaned up somebody else’s garbage, somebody that knows better or ought to, given what their folks pay for them to sit and spraddle their long legs out, toes of dirty sneakers marking up the walls. Retirement. Hah.
She has worked every day of her grown life. She has worked in dry cleaning, breathing steam and chemicals, feeling the folds of her lungs starching and stiffening. She has kept other people’s babies, changed their dirty diapers and whispered love words when the young mama is out somewhere in a business suit, trying to look like she might be somebody. They say, “Oh Mary, how we love her.” They say, “She is like family.” This is what they want to believe to be true. Sometimes she wants their lousy wish to be true as well, but then there’ll come a moment of reckoning that sends the skin of her neck up in little points. A rabbit running across her grave. She don’t want to be somebody’s charity. Don’t you go doing your good deeding on me.
But now she wishes she’d let that young college boy from next door help her get that air conditioner out of its huge carton by her front door. He said, “I can put it in the window for you,” and his thin white hands trembled when he spoke, like he might be scared of an old wrinkled-up black woman. Like maybe he’d never carried on a conversation with a black woman. Maybe he was taught at an early age to fear darkness. Like she might say boo and he’d up and run for the hills like that salesman done the day he come calling where she was setting with some children and he gets a scared look when she glares at him like she might up and slit his puny white throat, with those little children standing there in the doorway in diapers all wide-eyed.
Lord, yes, that’s how a child is meant to run. Naked as a jaybird. Squat by a tree or down by the creek. Sprawl your limbs out in a warm patch of grass or over a hardwood floor that’s cool. The coolest spot in the house is always right down on the floor, where the cool air seeps up from the dark underneath part of the house. She loved playing down there as a girl. She loved the feel of the cool black dirt and she saw it all from down there. Her mother and the other women who lived down that dusty road being picked up on summer mornings, their white dresses pressed perfect like they might be high-paid nurses heading off to the hospital. But then her mother came home late afternoon smelling like somebody else’s little girl while her own little girl had spent the afternoon with the children from nearby who ran wild without any grown-ups telling them what to do. The teenage girl who smoked cigarettes, her stomach already swole up with a baby. The big brother who was known to pin a girl down and rub hisself up against her belly, only giving in to her begging and crying if she lifted up her shirt. Mary had done that, turned her face into the cool black dirt while the whole neighborhood watched, while he called her Tiny Tit and pinched her there. She counted in her head all the while picturing her mother walking the clean padded hallways of a big brick house, the little girl’s room with a closet full of Sunday dresses and ruffly blouses that nobody was going to push up off her thin frightened chest.
“I hate that girl you keep,” she told her mother that night and on many others before bed, her mama too tired to even tell a bedtime story. “I hate her with her old white face. I hate her for thinking you love her.” And then she wanted to ask Do you love her? Do you? But her mother just frowned and let out a tired heavy breath. What could she say if she did love that girl and what difference did it make if she didn’t?
And Mary hates that skinny witch on the weather channel right now, too, with her flashy red jacket like she might be Miss Patooty. They all the time is wearing bright red and bright blue, strutting their feathers and saying Look at me, look at me, I’m over here in the television set. Look at the sky and tell the weather. Lord. She gets it better than most of them on the average day. You ain’t got to go to school or wear a suit that costs the same as a automobile to be able to lick your finger and hold it in the air. You ain’t got to live in a mansion with a Jacuzzi like all these folks have to be able to see how fast the clouds is moving or to take note of the sunset. People have thrown out common sense and trucked in a bunch of horse mess to make themselves feel great big and important.
THE OAK IS quivering, quivering in the heat,
the very movement putting her in mind of the old man who once a year stood at the front of the church and played his violin. That sound made people cry; it was a sad sound. People said he knew it all by ear—that he couldn’t read words or music; he just played what his heart felt like playing. It was a lonely sound like that sad bird she hears every morning, calling and calling, hopeless of an answer. Now as she watches the branches in that bright light she feels the same sadness. Beneath the tree is a ring of jonquils her mother planted, the Lord only knows how long ago, and every year they come up, weak green shoots, no blooms. They haven’t bloomed in over twenty years.
Once when she was a child, she stared up at the sky on a bright hot day. She searched the uppermost branches of that same old oak tree for a bird she heard calling. A sad sound. She waited and waited. She passed out from the brightness, the whole world growing dark and grainylike, the sounds in the air buzzing like something she could see, something she could reach out and touch. Her father scooped her up then and carried her to the shade of the back porch where her mama was running some sheets through a wringer. She never told them that she had forgotten to breathe while standing there, that the heat and brightness made her feel like a candle melting down into a shapeless puddle.
“LET ME HELP YOU,” that white boy said. “I know you live alone here and I don’t think you can get the air conditioner in the window by yourself. Please, let me do something for you.”
SHE HAD READ stories of young men muscling their way into old women’s houses to rummage their purses and then rape them to death. It was in the paper all the time. Poor old woman comes out of the Harris Teeter and gets kidnapped and what did they want? Her car. Her food. Surely she’d have given them that if there was no other way. She’d’ve said, Take it, children, take the money and the car keys and just leave me here in the parking lot and I won’t even call the policeman until you are way out of town. But it seemed that killing was a part of the plan. They wanted to kill is all. Many of them do.
“I can manage,” she told that boy and watched him amble back over to where he lived with a herd of wild ones of all sizes and shapes and colors. The kids from the university had been coming and going in and out of that old eyesore of a house for over twenty years, strewing their beer cans and talking the same stuff; the only thing that changed was their hairdos and outfits. That boy looked kind of hurt when he turned to go back into that zoo of a house but she couldn’t worry on that. Would she have let a black one in? She had to think it through. But no, she thought, she absolutely would not. This had nothing to do with color. It had to do with being alone in the world.
“YOU ARE PREJUDICED, MARY,” her coworker Bennie used to tell her when they took their breaks from cleaning up the campus buildings. “You are bad prejudiced, girl.”
“Maybe. Maybe I am,” she said. “Or maybe I’m just jealous of their clean easy worlds.”
“They don’t all have clean easy worlds.”
“In a town like this one they do.”
“So do a lot of the black folks.”
Those times there with Bennie were the best part of her life. Those were the times when all the anger that churned her insides just up and flew away. It made her want to sing. It made her want to crack jokes and laugh great big. She liked to tell jokes that were kind of dirty just to see Bennie get nervous and have to stare down at his feet while he chuckled. “You’re something else, Mary,” he said and she knew deep down that he meant that; she knew deep down that he felt something stirring. It was like the world was humming then, the great big oak trees there on campus filled with starlings, their wings shiny black in the light. People talked of these birds as a problem, the racket they made, the filth they dropped, the way they clustered together in one big mass and then took to the sky all at once: a screeching black cloud that drowned out everything else on the face of the earth. “Pests,” people cried, like they was one of the Bible plagues, but Mary liked when they gave her that loud second to catch her breath and turn her attention off of Bennie and what was a hopeless calling. She liked changing the subject after the racket like about how she had ordered herself a radio with a built-in cassette player that could also just play sounds. Like you could have yourself a thunderstorm or the ocean or birds at sunrise just by throwing a switch.
ONE DAY SHE will get everything organized. She likes the catalogs. That is her favorite thing, to sit and choose pretty things and then pick up the phone and call, put on a fancy-sounding voice. It is like being a kid with the Sears and Roebuck’s only she’s old and she has worked hard enough to save. She owns her house and she gets her pension. Her daddy paid off half the house and then she finished all by herself. Didn’t need a man even though there was many who offered. You think I want to spend my life feeding your fat behind and all those children you’ve planted in other women’s patches over the years? Come here to this garden to rest till the end of your days? Think again, you. Think again, old dog.
THE ONLY MAN she’d’ve ever had was Bennie, and as is true with everything good in life, he was spoken for, and his wife was the salt of the earth. Still sometimes when she closed her eyes after long days at the university she pictured herself laying there with Bennie. She’d rub her face up on that Egyptian cotton pillowcase she was so fond of and think of him. This was a pillowcase anybody would be proud to have; it comes from a place that has made bed linens a specialty of sorts. Her sheets are just like those she used to spend hours ironing in a big house on Main Street where she worked a little as a young woman. She loved to iron those fine linens. It was the finest cotton she’d ever run her fingers over. Buttery smooth. When she closes her eyes at night ain’t a soul on earth, not the president and whoever, and not Prince Charles and Camelia, or whatever the harlot calls herself, sleeping on a better piece of fabric.
THERE ARE BOXES to unpack and when she pulls out the new things it will give her a burst of energy and she will be able to get busy. It will be like Christmas morning right in the thick of a hot-as-Hades July. She’ll put on the sound of a tropical rain forest, and she’ll hang herself some new curtains, white priscillas with some beautiful hummingbird tieback holders. Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel and Ross-Simons and Bloomingdale’s. She fancies that they see her name come up on the computer screen and they comment what a good customer she is. What exquisite taste. She laughs. If they could see her now. Skinny black woman standing in the kitchen in nothing but underwear, nothing but a pair of size medium cotton drawers from Dillards, her breasts hanging and swinging to and fro like a Watusi. She imagines stepping out on her porch this way next time a white greasyfaced thing comes selling something. She’ll put an old chicken bone up in her hair and she’ll shoo him off with some mumbo jumbo, leaving him to think she’d cast a spell like she once done somebody at the dry-cleaning store.
That man was hateful like she’d never seen, talking to that skinny little white girl at the counter like she might’ve been a dog. Mary stepped forward and held out her hands and begun to twitch like she was picking up some kind of wave or something. “What is wrong with you, woman?” he asked and Mary just shook her head. “Oh, I ain’t the one with the problem I fear.” And she told him—much to the shock of everybody there waiting in line—that she had picked up on his sex problems and she sure was sorry. He acted like she was crazy as a bat but still he pushed her. What did she mean by that? She didn’t answer, just went on about her business, but as he was leaving she went over and whispered in his old waxy ear, “Your lovin’ days is over, sir. Your equipment is likely to just ride around in your drawers like a little dead varmint for the rest of your days.” She was asked to leave soon after but that was fine enough. The other workers looked up to her. She was a legend. Besides, her lungs needed a break from all the chemicals and heat.
AND IT IS SO HOT. Too hot to breathe. The hottest summer in a long while. By noon it is a hundred and five and the woman on the television set says it ain’t over yet. Mary has pulled all of the heavy yellowed shades to blo
ck the sun and feels her way around the boxes and piles of newspapers. She makes her way over to the crate with the air conditioner and sits on top of it. Order from Sears. Why didn’t she let them install it? Was she ashamed for folks to see the unopened boxes? The trash that needed to be hauled out? The recycling? Or was she scared of him, scared of what he might do to her if she didn’t tip him enough cash? Now she can’t remember. She hears that stray cat meowing and scratching on her door. Her feet are swollen or she might ask it in. But the last time she did that it was a spooked cat and left a bloody stripe down her arm. It is odd how dark it is in here. Beyond the shade there are kids blowing their horns and riding their bikes. They are buzzing and screaming.
SHE RAISES THE BLIND. Bees in the clover. A distant knocking. A woodpecker? That boy again? She does not trust such young men. There was once one that let her know she was an animal herself if she had to be. He acted like he wanted her for herself but that wasn’t what he wanted at all. What he wanted didn’t even need a face or a brain. She could have killed him so easy. She said, “Don’t make me kill you.” She had a tiny little crochet hook she grabbed from her bedside table—one for making lace—and it was pointed right at his ear. She said, “Don’t make me kill you because I will.” She said, “I will puncture your brain. Or maybe I’ll let you live and go on to prison because old butt-buggering bubba might need hisself a date to the prison prom.” She could have killed him, could have beaten the everlovin’ life from him. A few things like that happen in life and you stop trusting even when you want to so bad.
Creatures of Habit Page 14